Search results

The paper presents an examination of ways in which religious views of medieval Japan noblemen are reflected in the didactic tales (setsuwa) literature – on the example of Kojidan (Tales About Old Matters), a setsuwa collection compiled in the early 13th century. Due to social status of the author, Minamoto-no Akikane, this collection is an instance of nobleman's religious thought as itself. It consists of six chapters, and each one of those includes religious-themed tales. The fifth chapter is devoted to temples and shrines. Selected stories from this section became a material for analyses in this paper. Noblemen are depicted there as patrons of Buddhism in Japan like prince Shōtoku Taishi, as founders of temples and dedicated to gods kami shrines, as well as parishioners who can be awarded with miracle in response to their prayers, or evil sinners. There are greatest temple-shrines complexes that are mentioned in this chapter and be­tween heroes there are many high-standing persons as famous as Fujiwara-no Michinaga. Akikane pays attention to the formal relationships between policy and religion institutions, and the greatest interest for him lies in matters of peo­ple's faith. There is sizable amount of sources used by compiler, some of those are earlier collections of setsuwa tales. Akikane adopted these stories and made subtle changes in them to achieve wanted impression: for instance, he made it with tale about sinner Nagate, borrowed from Nihon ryōiki

Tales of Times Now Past (Konjaku monogatari-shū, 1120s) is the most extensive Japanese didactic tales (setsuwa) compilation, a significant source for explo­ration of medieval Japanese culture. This tales collection consists of more than one thousand stories, in which action takes place in India, China and Japan. The text had been created by highly educated authors mostly for unsophisticated readers, and in the same time it is positioned on the intersection of different reli­gious and literary traditions. In this paper the way how heritage of those tradi­tions is transformed in setsuwa is considered on the example of conception of wisdom. In Konjaku monogatari-shū this conception is multicomponent, has much in common with one in the Chinese classical philosophy and determined by Buddhist world outlook, which was intrinsic for the investigated tale collection. Great variety of characters from all social groups can be described in the Tales like people, who possess the wisdom in one its aspect or another: there are not only famous sages such as Confucius and Zhuang Zhou, prominent Buddhist saints or even Gautama Buddha himself, not only sovereigns and high officials, but also common laity, men and women, children and elderly people. There is a great similarity between concept of "wisdom" in this text and the one of mod­ern Japanese people.

The article summarizes the results of the historical and philosophical research "Collection of ancient stories" (Konjaku monogatari-shū, 1120s). This largest Ja­panese collection of setsuwa tales paints a picture of world history from the era of Buddha to the age of mappō, "Decline of Buddhist Teaching", tracing the milestones in the spread of Buddhism in India, China and Japan. The two most important Buddhist attitudes – the world is impermanent and at the same time each event is embedded into a universal system of cause-and-effect rela­tionships – are reflected not only at the level of the content of an individual story, but also at the level of connecting stories into a holistic narrative. All events have instructive educative? meaning; everyday experience always leads to the same conclusions as the teachings of Buddha. In this experience, a person in­evitably makes some connections – with other people, living and dead, with ani­mals and spirits, gods and buddhas – and these connections involving this person in the cycle of birth and death, if properly understood, provide the basis for liber­ation. The narrator draws a line between a proper and an inappropriate under­standing of what is happening, talking about the "immeasurable" (grief, joy, fear, etc.), and thus allows the readers to find the "measure", kagiri, in their relation to what is happening. The march of time can be understood both as a general move­ment from the best to the worst, and – on small intervals – as a reverse move­ment from grief to happiness, from misunderstanding to understanding. A person is free to choose which events to keep in memory and which to forget; people make this choice whilst instructive storytelling, and setsuwa tradition preserves it.